Twins And Nature-Nurture Controversy

How does the study of twins help us understand the nature-nurture controversy with respect to intelligence better?

Twins are a staple of film and literature, often used as a device to show two sides of the same character — a sort of alternate reality, where two people spent at least the first nine months of their existence together, but somehow ended up in vastly different situations. From Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia Organa of Star Wars to Michael and Garthe Knight of Knight Rider, it’s a familiar trope that’s rarely used anymore unless it’s ironically.

Our DNA is very good at replicating itself without errors, but it’s also extraordinarily long — a book publishing an individual’s DNA would be roughly the length of 1000 copies of “War and Peace.” Due to DNA’s size, even a near perfect copying mechanism introduces some errors,

In the early 1990s, a series of studies conducted by Kyllonen and Christal came to the conclusion that a specific type of memory is almost synonomous with our ability to reason.

Working memory is what you might call immediate memory. It’s your capacity to store several images and sounds in your head at the same time.

Kyllonen and Christal’s studies found an incredibly high correlation between working memory and intelligence. In a series of four experiments, they measured people’s reasoning ability as well as their ability to hold different items in their mind at the same time. They discovered that these two abilities were correlated in the range of 80 to 90 percent. Correlations this high are virtually unheard of.

The results were so striking that they authored the paper Reasoning Ability is (Little More Than) Working-Memory Capacity?! The paper became extremely influential during the ’90s. The authors themselves were half-joking when they titled the paper, but many scientists began to question whether this could actually be true.

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